Police in Punjab’s Chiniot district have registered a criminal case against a man whose pet dog attacked a father and son walking past his home, leaving both of them injured. The case, lodged after a complaint by a municipal enforcement officer, has put the spotlight on a rule many dog owners still appear to ignore: no one is supposed to keep a pet dog without the permission of the local municipal authority.
The case was registered against Nazim Ali, a resident of Mohallah Baqir Wali in Chiniot, after his dog set upon two passersby, Muhammad Usman and his father Abdul Raheem. The two men were passing through the area when the animal attacked them, and both were injured. The complaint was filed by Muhammad Saleem, an enforcement inspector of the Chiniot Municipal Committee.
What turned an ordinary dog attack into a police case was not only the injuries but the circumstances in which the animal was being kept. The inquiry found that Nazim Ali had been keeping the dog at his home without the required no-objection certificate (NOC) from the municipal committee. The animal was unregistered, and its owner had never sought the formal permission that local rules demand. Police said the suspect fled after learning that a case had been registered against him.
The incident comes as the Punjab government has been tightening the rules around pet dogs. In April this year, the provincial government made the registration of pet dogs mandatory across Punjab, in both urban and rural areas, and issued a formal registration form. Under the policy, anyone keeping a dog must submit the animal’s complete record, including the owner’s name and the dog’s breed, to the livestock department or the relevant union council office. Owners must also submit an affidavit on stamp paper worth 300 rupees, declaring whether the dog is kept as a hobby, for security, or for business. Vaccination of pet dogs has also been made compulsory, dogs are not permitted to roam freely in public places, and the government warned that legal action would follow any violation.
Chiniot is not the first district to try enforcing such rules. In January, the Vehari administration ordered the registration of all pet dogs in the district after a rise in dog-bite incidents, with the deputy commissioner warning that the owner of a dog that bit someone would be booked under criminal charges. That warning now reads like a preview of events in Chiniot.
The scale of the problem behind these orders is considerable. According to figures from the Punjab health department reported in September, the province had recorded 70,586 dog-bite cases during the current year, including 30,514 in Lahore alone, with four people dying of rabies after being bitten. The province has been recording an average of around 400 dog-bite cases every day, after a total of 243,299 cases in 2025. In October, a 70-year-old man from Jaranwala became the third person in Punjab to die of rabies that month. Rabies is preventable through timely medical treatment after exposure, but once its symptoms develop, it is almost always fatal.
Most of those cases involve stray dogs rather than pets, and the government has introduced programmes to capture, neuter, vaccinate and release stray animals in an effort to limit their numbers. Yet the Chiniot incident shows that the danger is not limited to strays. A pet dog kept without registration, without proof of vaccination and without proper restraint can be just as dangerous to people walking past, and its owner can be identified and held to account. That is the point of registration: it records who owns which animal and who is responsible when something goes wrong.
For the two men who were attacked, the case is now a matter for the police and the courts, while the owner who fled will have to answer for keeping the animal without permission and for the injuries it caused. Whether the case leads to a conviction will depend on the investigation, and the police have not yet said what charges have been applied or when the suspect is expected to be arrested. The authorities in Chiniot have chosen to treat the matter as a criminal offence rather than a neighbourhood dispute, and that choice sends a message to other owners who keep dogs without registration.
The wider lesson goes beyond a single street in Chiniot. Registration forms, affidavits and vaccination certificates only protect the public if they are enforced before an attack happens, not after it. The rules announced in April were written to prevent exactly this kind of incident, yet months later a dog was still being kept in a residential area without the required certificate, and it was only after a father and son were injured that the system moved into action. If the Chiniot case is to mean anything more than a single arrest, the authorities will need to show that unregistered dogs are being identified as a matter of routine, rather than waiting for the next attack to force their hand.
